Keep ICE away from airport security — pay TSA instead

On Sunday, the president announced on Truth Social that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will be deployed to support airport security operations as the Homeland Security shutdown drags on. It may sound like a reasonable way to address shortages of Transportation Security Administration officers, who have gone without pay for more than five weeks. However, reassigning ICE officers to airport security checkpoint makes no sense — and might even be dangerous.

To become a TSA officer requires extensive training; the procedures that enable officers to perform their jobs effectively and efficiently, and to work as a unit, cannot be learned overnight. Border czar Tom Homan clarified Sunday night that ICE officers will not be working with sophisticated technologies like Advanced Imaging for physical screening or computed tomography scanners for checked and carry-on baggage technologies. Bringing ICE officers up to speed with such technologies would take weeks, which would do nothing to resolve short-term backups at airport security checkpoints where TSA officer no-shows rates are spiking. 

That means ICE officers would have a highly restricted footprint of tasks they could perform, such as being stationed at exit gates as passengers leave airport secure areas.  

Deploying ICE officers at the entry of airport security checkpoints would be risky, potentially disrupting a well-coordinated operation. This includes checking passenger identification either manually or using the CAT-2 system, given that identity authentication is tied in with the Secure Flight database, a critical layer of aviation security.  

Inserting ICE officers into airport security checkpoint operations may disrupt the flow of passenger screening, given that TSA officers at airport security checkpoints function as a unit, with each member knowing what all the other members are doing and how to do it. Adding inexperienced people onto this team, even when assigned the most innocuous tasks, may impact the effectiveness of the entire checkpoint operation. 

There is also the issue of how ICE officers would be identified and distinguished from TSA officers, how they would be dressed, and whether they carry firearms (which are unnecessary).  Given their limited footprint of usefulness, TSA officers can just as easily be supplemented with local and state law enforcement officers, many of which are stationed at airports anyway. 

What moving ICE officers to airport security checkpoints really reveals is that there are ample funds available to pay ICE officers, but a choice is being made not to pay TSA officers. The practical solution is to pay the TSA officers with the funds being used for ICE, as they are both operating under the umbrella of Homeland Security.

The partial government shutdown has no clear path for resolution. Both parties are firmly entrenched. As the shutdown continues into its second month, and likely beyond, TSA officers will become worn down.  

Given that one-quarter of households live paycheck to paycheck, many officers are being pushed beyond their financial sustenance. The only reason that they continue to show up for work is that they know that they will eventually get paid.  But getting paid eventually does not put food on their table today, pay their rent or mortgages, or cover their bills this month to keep their families safe and secure.

Eventually, some portion of the 50,000 TSA officers will resign, forced to seek other employment options out of necessity. Given that the attrition rate for TSA was around 8 percent in 2024, this means that around 330 of them typically resign every month. Recent reports of nearly 400 resigning since the start of the shutdown is well within the expected numbers. If this number jumps to 1,000 or more per month, airport security operations will be critically hampered at some airports, with no infusion of ICE officers sufficient to fill the void. 

Moving ICE officers to airport security checkpoints is a bad idea, bordering on dangerous. The cost to pay all TSA officers is around $120 million per week — a very small portion of the funds available within the Homeland Security Department. All it requires is for lawmakers in both parties to do the right thing by paying TSA officers, rather than playing politics with the safety and security of the nation’s air system and the 2.5 million passengers who fly on average every day.

Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of computer science in the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He has researched risk-based aviation security for more than 25 years, which provided the technical justification for TSA PreCheck.

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